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ah yes, one of My Finest Creations! You might think turtles help prove that pagan theory which must not be named, but you would be wrong. Did you know that all turtles love Me? They are all baptist fundamentalists, which is why I let them live so long.

I spent the summer of my third undergraduate year volunteering at the Sedgwick County Zoo in the Reptile and Amphibian house (sadly, the summer before the parthenogenetic Komodo dragons hatched, so I just missed them). I loved maintaining the Aldabra tortoise yard though. It was amusing to scratch their necks and watch them stretch out in evident pleasure!

ah yes, one of My Finest Creations! You might think turtles help prove that pagan theory which must not be named, but you would be wrong. Did you know that all turtles love Me? They are all baptist fundamentalists, which is why I let them live so long.

What a beautiful photo! Years ago, in the 1950’s, at the Toledo Zoo aquarium in Ohio, there was an enormous alligator snapping turtle that had almost the same dignity as the tortoise in your photo. Those dinosaurian-looking legs and feet; the Toledo Zoo also had a Galapagos tortoise in its petting zoo area, upon which little children could ride. Not humane, but we were very impressed with the animal.
Thanks for this amazing image.

Or not; it just depends where you live and/or learned English.
In the USA, any chelonian is a “turtle,” a “tortoise” is a specialized land-dwelling member of the family Testudinidae, and sea turtles are called…sea turtles. “Terrapin” refers to the coastal diamondback terapin (Malaclemys terrapin), and colloquially to box turtles in Arkansas and Oklahoma.
In the European UK, “turtle” specifically means sea turtle, “tortoise” means a testudinid as above, and any freshwater chelonian can be a “terrapin.”
In Australia they have no real tortoises, so they have chosen to call any old freshwater chelonian a “tortoise” (by which they usually mean one of those weird side-necks they have down there). “Turtle” means sea turtle.

I don’t know that it’s particularly inhumane. Those tortoises are astoundingly strong; they could lift small cars if they had the inclination. I doubt that one, or even three or four, small children would pose a burden to them. They probably didn’t even notice half the time.

A shrine of my youth was the Turtleback Zoo in West Orange, NJ, so called because they had a nice herd of giant tortoises that kids could climb on…in the unlikely event that it moved at all, you were “riding.”. It’s still there, but I doubt you can ride on the tortoises anymore.

The Galapagos Islands are sort of named after the tortoise. A galapago is an old Spanish word for a sort of saddle. Some of the tortoises look like the saddle, so they got called galapagos tortoises. Hence Galapagos Islands.